Denver International Airport officials are planning a remake of the iconic terminal in a way that would make the Great Hall under the tent part of the secure, or “sterile,” side of the airport.

Sterile areas now include DIA’s concourses and the platforms of the train that transfers passengers between the terminal and concourses.

All visitors to the airport now can enter the Jeppe sen terminal, including the Great Hall, without being screened.

A redesign extending the sterile area to the Great Hall would allow travelers who use DIA merely to transfer from one plane to another to take the train to the terminal to eat and shop without having to be rescreened by security, said DIA manager Kim Day, after briefing the Denver City Council on Wednesday on the airport’s terminal redevelopment plans.

Those plans carry a construction price tag that could reach nearly $1 billion and include a new FasTracks train station at DIA, a train-station plaza, rail bridges for the route into the airport and a new Westin hotel adjacent to the terminal.

The improvements would be paid for out of airport revenues, Day said. It is possible that the airport will issue bonds to raise more money for its capital program.

Chance to hike revenue

Airport officials are promoting the Great Hall makeover in part because about 44 percent of the 50 million travelers DIA handles annually are making connections and may be shunning the terminal because of the need for rescreening.

“This is an opportunity to create yet another venue for non-aviation revenue,” Day said, referring to food, beverage and retail revenues that airports try to boost as a way to help keep down the cost of space they rent to airlines.

A reconfiguration of the terminal would require the move of some Transportation Security Administration checkpoints and likely also include redesign of the airport’s sixth-level ticketing areas, Day said.

DIA’s plan calls for security screening possibly to shift from the Great Hall to the fifth- and sixth-level “wings” where ticketing and luggage-retrieval now occur, Day said.

New locations also might be created on the east and west wings for greeting arriving airline passengers, she said.

The airport’s key aim is to reclaim the Great Hall as an open space for air travelers.

When DIA first opened, the terminal was “a wonderful architectural icon inside and out,” Day said, recalling arriving by air in Denver before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and coming up from the train “into an unbelievably beautiful space” under the tent.

But “we took the inside away when TSA took over,” she added, referring to the ceding of so much of the Great Hall’s floor space to security screening.

The makeover of the Great Hall is part of a terminal redevelopment program that will include design and construction of a rail station at the terminal’s south end for people using the FasTracks train.

Project manager picked

Day presented the plan to the City Council’s economic-development committee as part of a request to hire Parsons Transportation as project manager and head of a team of companies that will oversee all phases of terminal redevelopment.

The contract with Parsons calls for DIA to pay the company up to $160 million over seven years to oversee design and construction of numerous terminal improvements, including the Great Hall makeover, the rail station and plaza for users of RTD’s planned $1.4 billion airport train, train bridges over Peña Boulevard and a terminal exit road, and the new hotel.

One reason DIA selected Parsons was the inclusion of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava on the team of engineering, design, architectural and environmental firms that Parsons put together, Day said.

Parsons will oversee and monitor between $700 million and $950 million in terminal reconstruction and commuter-rail bridge work, DIA officials said.

The airport estimates that the work by Parsons and its team will separately cost DIA about $80 million to $90 million, Day said, and that it won’t have to pay Parsons the full $160 million as authorized in the contract.

But the open-ended commitment to possibly pay the full amount troubled Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz, who fretted that airport officials were “asking me to approve a dart board.”

Day and other DIA officials at the meeting assured the council that the $160 million cap was not arbitrary, but rather a high-end estimate to help prevent DIA from coming back for multiple upward revisions.

Day said DIA will forward to council members a detailed breakdown of how the elements of Parsons’ program management contract, which is estimated to top out at $90 million, will tie in with oversight of the entire terminal redevelopment.

Last month, Denver’s Department of Safety fired a deputy sheriff for using racial slurs and harassing inmates and a police sergeant for drinking while in uniform and abandoning a post to have sex with a woman.

A wedding and special events’ planning business has agreed to pay a $200,000 settlement to five employees living in the country illegally after allegedly failing to pay them minimum wages and overtime and discriminating against them because of their race.